|
Mbeki Off The Hook |
| Publication |
Cape Times |
| Date | 2008-06-19 |
| Reporter | Karyn Maughan, Jeremy Gordin |
|
Web Link |
President Thabo Mbeki is no longer under suspicion for any alleged
corruption involving South Africa's controversial arms deal with Germany.
The Dusseldorf public prosecutor's office this week permanently ended its
investigations into the multibillion-rand sale of four corvettes to the South
African Navy.
Mbeki and other senior ANC members were alleged to have received massive bribes
for the deal.
The decision to close the case comes after SA failed to
provide German authorities with any of the information they had requested to
finalise their case.
"We needed to find where the money might have gone...and we were unable
to do so," Arno Neukirchen of the Dusseldorf public prosecutor's office told The
Star on Wednesday.
"This investigation has been going on for a long time and we did not believe we
had a good chance of securing convictions."
Neukirchen has led the prosecuting team investigating whether former employees
of massive steel and arms manufacturing group ThyssenKrupp, among others, were
guilty of "criminally relevant behaviour" in connection with the corvette sales
in the late 1990s and an intended sale to Angola's navy.
When the probe was announced in Der Spiegel magazine in 2006, connections were
immediately made with Mbeki, who was alleged to have helped "turn" the tender in
ThyssenKrupp's favour in 1999.
In February last year the magazine further reported that
German prosecutors had internal memos from ThyssenKrupp detailing meetings at
which Chippy Shaik allegedly demanded payment of $3-million to ensure the
success of the German bid.
Shaik, a brother of fraudster Schabir - former financial adviser to Jacob
Zuma - was the government's head of arms purchases when the contract for the
arms package was concluded.
Now it seems that none of the allegations against him or Mbeki can be backed up
with evidence.
Although confirming that his office had found evidence of crimes on the part of
some former ThyssenKrupp employees against the company itself, Neukirchen on
Wednesday said those had nothing to do with the corvettes.
Earlier, the German prosecutor reportedly described the
information they had sought from South African authorities as essential to their
investigation.
But on Wednesday he said: "We were not surprised (when the SA Justice
Department did not provide the information sought...the nature of the
information was complex and probably difficult to gather."
Presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga's only comment was to point out
that Mbeki had called on anyone with evidence against him to come forward.
ThyssenKrupp said "criminally relevant behaviour, in particular acts of bribery,
were not established by the public prosecutor's office".
* This article was originally published on page 1 of The Star on June 19,
2008
With acknowledgements to Karyn Maughan, Jeremy Gordin and Cape Times.